And even sadder for her…I realized at that moment that I was probably the only one in the entire world who actually cared that she was dead.
“What’s the next move?” I tried to guide my brain onto a new track, away from that grim thought, before it favored me with the inevitable comparison between me and Andromeda – because I’d been where she was, without anyone to care whether I lived or died.
“We’re at war,” Ariadne said. “We have all our agents on recall, every single campus is at a heightened state of alert. All six Directorate campuses have reported similar incidents, with human agents being drawn out on missions and slaughtered. We’ve lost something like seventy-five percent of our human resources in the course of the last few days, along with a few metas.”
I started to ask something, to mention my amazement at the scope of that number and what it meant, but stopped when the doors slid open behind Old Man Winter and someone walked into the medical unit. I could feel the drugs affecting my system, because I actually smiled when I saw who it was. I might have smiled anyway, if I knew no one else was around, but in this case I did it in spite of that. “What’s up, Doc?”
“Been watching those Looney Tunes DVDs I lent you?” The wide smile that greeted me in return was good enough to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Dr. Quinton Zollers made his way across the medical unit to my other bedside, after greeting Ariadne and Old Man Winter with a perfunctory nod. “I had a feeling you’d have an appreciation for Wile E. Coyote, after all you’ve been through.” He looked down at me, and his mocha skin crinkled around the eyes. “Maybe even more, now.”
“Yeah, I don’t remember the bullets in those cartoons doing quite this kind of damage,” I said, pointing toward my afflicted arm. “I expected some general scorching all about my body, but this? Ouch.”
“Thought I’d check on you,” Zollers said. “Heard you ran into your mom.”
“I did,” I said. “And as much as I’d loooove to talk about it…” I wouldn’t, but I’d be willing to with Zollers more than anyone else. “…we were just discussing the war.”
Zollers frowned, his dark face made darker still by his expression. “We’ve lost a lot of good people in the last few days.”
“More to come if we’re not careful,” Ariadne said. “And if it’s really true we have a traitor in our midst—”
“Traitor?” Zollers asked, scrunching his face. “Where’d this come from?”
“Andromeda,” I said, and met his gaze; I could see the concern in him. “She told me before she got killed by those Omega gunmen.”
“I see,” Zollers said. “Well, that’s a kink in our garden hose.”
“To put it mildly,” Old Man Winter said. “If true, I want this traitor ferreted out.”
“How do you propose to do that?” Ariadne said. “I mean, we have a staff of hundreds just at this campus, assuming here was where Andromeda meant, and assuming she knew what she was talking about.”
“You can narrow that down,” I said. “These guys, this attack, it wasn’t random. We were on US Highway 8, taking the long way home to try and avoid getting hit – you can’t tell me they sent a helicopter along every major route to the cities. Someone knew where we were, knew we were coming, and it’s because they either managed to figure out how to trace our cell phones or because someone gave them our route.”
Ariadne exchanged a look with Old Man Winter. “Only a dozen, maybe a few more knew that you were on your way back. But there aren’t that many likely routes back to the Directorate. Interstate 94 may be the most likely, but Highway 8 is not that far out of the question. They may have scanned 94 and then gone to the alternate as soon as they realized you weren’t there.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The timing is all wrong. They hit us at an isolated point in the road, one of the last few. They hit us with an RPG, which required some effort to set up the shot, and—”
“They caught us at the worst possible moment,” Kurt said, interrupting and drawing the attention back to him. “There’s no way they caught us by pure accident. They knew. They knew we were on that road, at that time.”
“They could have traced our cellphones, though,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened even on this trip.”
“Did you have your cellphone on you?” Kurt looked at me, expectant.
“No; it got destroyed…in the last car that blew up when they fired a rocket at it,” I said sheepishly.
“Remind me not to go for a Sunday drive with you,” Zollers said.
“So, I didn’t have mine,” I said. “The question is, did Scott have his? Did Zack?”
“Zack did,” Ariadne said. “It’s how we tracked you down to send in M-Squad. He had the line open to us.”
“And I had him,” I said. “Good thing we didn’t leave him behind.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said, dark clouds brewing upon his face, “unlike some poor bastards I know.”
“They kept on us when we were out there, too,” I pointed out. “They followed us relentlessly. Scott and I assumed they had a thermal imaging device of some sort, tracking our body heat, but they may have just been tracking Zack’s cell phone.”
“That’s not easy to do,” Ariadne said. “It’d take a hell of an expert to track the GPS in a phone. And you’d have to know what phone you’re looking for, first.”
“Which is where your traitor would come in,” Zollers said. “If they knew who was on the mission, they could pass along the cell number and allow Omega to track them down. Further, this is hardly the sort of deeply traitorous stuff that you’d expect. It could have been done by someone unintentionally.”
“How do you inadvertently give away the cell phone numbers of agents in a manner that gets them killed?” Kurt asked.
“Simple enough,” Zollers said. “My work cell phone, for instance, contains the numbers for almost every agent in the Directorate’s Minneapolis campus. All it would take is for my cell phone to be viewed by another party for them to have all the numbers for every single person who’s been hunted and killed in the last few days. The person whose phone was viewed wouldn’t even necessarily have to know about it – perhaps they simply…” He hesitated. “…were deceived. They might have…slept with someone, stepped into the shower and allowed them access to their cell phone…”
I felt scarlet creep up my cheeks, hot embarrassment at Zollers’ words, at the suggestion. All it took to get people killed was the numbers of every agent they wanted tracked down, pilfered from a Directorate Operative’s cell phone by someone from Omega, unsupervised. Someone like James Fries.
“We could search through everyone,” Ariadne said, “for months, and still come up dry. This is…so much data. So many people. How do you even start?”
“You don’t need to start,” I said, feeling the dark cloud settling in over me. “It was me. I left my cell phone in my hotel room last night with an Omega operative,” I said, “while I was on the conference call with you, Ariadne. I didn’t know he was Omega at the time, and I didn’t know what would happen, but it was me…I left it in there with him for at least a half-hour.” I shook my head, and pummeled myself inside for my supreme stupidity. “It was me.”
Chapter 6
The room seemed to freeze around me, the life drained out of it like air all exhaled in one great breath. I didn’t want to look up at any of them, but when I did, I saw Ariadne staring at me in numbest shock, her mouth open and trying to move, caught comically agape. Zollers cleared his throat and looked away, which was, I think, the worst reaction of them all. I heard Kurt snort on the bed behind Zollers, but I didn’t much care about him.
“What…” Ariadne stumbled over her attempt to speak, then recovered, her face going through several changes of expression. “What were you…” Her eyes rolled back, like she was trying to recall something, and I saw her white-knuckle the railing of my bed, before she finally managed a full sentence. “What…was he doing there?”